Hey there!
First off, I wanted to say on behalf of the entire mod team that we hoped this place would be successful but none of us expected to reach over 1,000 subscribers in 96 hours. That’s incredible and we are extremely humbled and grateful. The community has thrived and we’re so happy to see so many people engaging with the community, whether thats posts or comments. Things have really kicked off and we hope things only get better from here!
That being said, we as mods do have some work to do. This community was made with the idea that we would have clear rules written for our users so you knew when to expect intervention from the moderation team. We’re all pretty new at this and while we have the advice and experience of others who have been doing this for far long, we do have to still update things as they go.
There have been some posts made recently that were reported and brought to light. The mod team has been discussing it behind the scenes and we decided we needed to address it by adding a couple of more rules to the sidebar. If we started removing posts without giving explanations on the side of what to expect, then we’ve failed in our original purpose for the community. So the new rules being added are as follows:
The first new one is No AI Art. It hurts the creative community overall but is also very low-effort in general. There are many communities in which AI can work but this isn’t one of them.
The second is No reposts within 1-2 months. We’re keeping the timeframe vague because mistakes happen and you might not be aware of if posts did happen at all. Then there’s the factor of how popular that post was and whether it would have easily been seen. However we’re really generous and understand that not everyone is active at all times. Reposts within 48 hours? That’s something different.
The third new one is Limit of 3-4 posts per hour. Honestly that’s probably more than anyone really needs to begin with but we don’t want to hamper the community. If things grow and activity does too then we can definitely revisit this but as it stands, posting 5 posts within the space of 30 minutes is essentially spam.
We hope that everyone understands the changes we’ve made and that more changes may come in the future, especially so early on in the lifespan of /c/TenForward. Thank you guys for your time, patience, activity, engagement and love. We all feel it here at the mod team and reflect it back at you.
Live long and prosper!
As one of the mods who agreed to the no AI rule, it has nothing to do with the whole AI stealing art debate (to me anyway), it’s the low quality nature of the AI posts. AI just doesn’t do Star Trek properly and it definitely doesn’t do the faces of Star Trek actors properly. That’s why I was against AI posts.
Holy shit, no kidding. Some actors it likes, others… I once tried to make a group photo with all the captains, I tried many different models, lots of tricks (plenty of advancements since then, I could probably pull it off nowadays) and it was a disaster. I’ll post one or two of those if I can find them again, absolute waste of an afternoon.
In my experience so far, it rarely even gets the Enterprise right. Any of them.
That’s actually a good example, “any of them”. Unless the model is trained by someone with specific interest in Star Trek, the Enterprise has… what, 60 years of different reinterpretations? I enjoy generative AI, and made let’s call it an extension to be able to make the old Fiat Panda. Without it, you’d get either the new one, or randomness. And with my efforts now it’s possible to get-ish it. My dataset wasn’t the greatest quality or variety, plus I didn’t put a ton of effort into tagging the single pictures so it’s not very flexible or particularly good. It works sufficiently well and I’m happy with it, but I’m very aware of its shortcomings… namely that I didn’t tag any picture with the orientation of the car. It is however a car so it has a basic framework to show it, while the Enterprise? Not the most simple subject to reproduce. Anyway you don’t really care, sorry for that minor wall of text :D
I believe that rules should be about what the actual problem is. If memes and shitposts that don’t “do the faces properly” are the problem, make a rule against that.
AI can be part of a workflow, it’s not just “throw down a prompt and then shovel whatever comes out onto tenforward.” The image might not have any faces in it, or the faces might not have been part of what the AI touched - I use inpainting on “real” pictures frequently, for example.
And in six months time, the state of the art in AI image generation may have reached the point where this reason is no longer viable, and AI Star Trek actors are indistinguishable from the real thing. Will this rule be revisited regularly?
